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poster
In this longitudinal classroom study, with a cross-sectional design, we evaluate monthly the children's spelling ability at first and second year of kindergarten (37 four year olds, and 36 five year olds) and first year of primary school (53 six year olds) using dictation tests. Our aim was to study the underlying processes involved in spelling acquisition in the early years of schooling, searching evidence of the children's phonological and orthographic knowledge use. We found seven categories of spelling based on the kind of error children make. They show that the increasing mastering of spelling at these early ages involves the acquisition of the phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules, but specially, the ability to make more accurate phonological analysis of the words, mainly phonemic. At the very beginning of the academic year, and in all ages, children do not seem to be aware of phonemes but of bigger linguistic units. However, very quickly they begin to segment words into their smaller units, and they become able to distinguish between phonemes that only differ in one articulatory feature. With the increasing phonological knowledge, children also develop specific knowledge about some words that involve sounds that can be represented by more than one grapheme. We compare the evolution of the spelling acquisition of the three groups of children and of the type of errors. Whereas they confirm that beginning spelling is driven by phonology, they also show that this knowledge is not sufficient to guarantee the progress in spelling. We discuss the results in terms of the possible existence of the phases proposed by cognitive models of spelling development.Abstract:During an academic year, we have collected samples of words spelled by children aged 4, 5 (who received an asistematic teaching of spelling) and 6 (who received a sistematic teaching of spelling). After a clasification of the different types of spelling that were found, seven categories of spelling types were obtained. These categories could represent differents stages at spelling development. This paper present those categories and what types of knowledges and proccessess may underlie at them.Full paper:Models about development of spelling words, in alphabetic languages, proposed in the last two decades (Ehri, 1986; Frith, 1985; Gentry, 1978, 1982; Henderson & Beers, 1980; Morris, 1980), share three main topics: (i) they are based on children performance and pay special attention to errors that children make while they spell novel words (ii) are descriptive theories of stages in spelling development, and (iii) pay attention to children's phonological awareness althought they admit the relevance of orthographic knowledge (Ellis, 1994).>From these models, and the empirical works from them derived, it is assumed the existence of three main stages which children progressively advance through. First of them is called (Ellis, 1994) 'precommunicative', appearing simbolic or logographic spellings. After this stage, the proccess of acquiring alphabetic code begins until it is mastered ('alphabetic' stage). Finally, children arrive to the 'orthographic' stage, where children performe spelling in a conventional way. Second stage has been subdivided in another three stages: 'semiphonetic', 'phonetic' and 'transitional' (Ellis, 1994). At 'semiphonetic' stage, children begin to show some kind of knowledge about the relation between sound and spelling, but this is still a partial knowledge with an incomplete mapping of phonetic content in words. At 'phonetic' stage, children evidence their ability to segment words in their constituent phonemes but letters still are assigned on the basis of sound, without attending to orthographic conventions. In the 'transitional' stage, children's spelling reveals their awareness of certain conventions of lenguage, even this awareness will not be completed until the following and final stage ('orthographic').These models and stages have arisen from empirical works with English population and describe quite fine-grainnedly, development of spelling in English. Althought some studies about spelling development in Spanish-speaking children have been carried out (Bozorne y Signorini, 1998; Cuetos & Valle-Arroyo, 1988; Serrano, Alegr’a & Carrillo, 1999; Valle-Arroyo, 1989), we have no notice of a complete monitoring of spelling development, from the begining of children schooling until they reach a good level of spelling mastery.There are some critical differences between Spanish and English. English is characterized by a deeper orthograpy than Spanish, which is almost shallow and the number of vowels in English is bigger than in Spanish where there are only five. Also in English there are stronger differences at phonetic complexity. Being aware of these differences, we wondered if we would find the same stages in spelling development in Spanish children or not. So, the aim of this study is to examine early spelling development in Spanish children. For this, we have collected a wide sample of words, spelled by children aged 4 to 6, to categorize them according to the kind of errors that children made. Resulting categories would reflect children's knowledge and the strategies that they use to spell and may be a first step to, later on, empirically investigate the nature of these knowledges.We carried out a longitudinal cross-sectional study with three groups of children aged 4, 5 (kindergarten 1 and 2) and 6 (primary school 1). Participation of children who, still, had not even begun spelling learning proccess as children who had already begun and were advancing through this proccess, let us verify the presence or not of the three main stages (precommunicative, alphabetic and orthographic) commonly accepted.METHODSample. 101 children belonging to three groups of age participated (see table 1).--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Insert Table 1--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Attending to their alphabetic knowledge, groups were characterized by a weak knowledge in the kindergarten 1 group (from now on, 1k) a certain familiarity with it , in kindergarten 2 (fron now on, 2k) and by a sistematic learning of the alphabet (and alphabetic principle) in the primary school group (from now on, 1p).Procedure. Children's spelling samples were obtained from simple words (generally bisyllabics) dictated to children in groups of six words each session. Of these six words, two contained a letter recently learned, two contained a letter which sound was similar to the sound of a letter recently learned and, the other two words, contained a dipthong. Children who did not know any letter or just vowels, passed a similar test in which they had to spell six simple words and were invited to play 'they were able to spell' (invented spelling).Tests were the same for the three groups. Now, tests were passed according to the individual proccess of learning, so that 1p children, who learned a bigger number of letters, passed all the tests proposed and 1k children passed only three different tests, repeating from one month to another, the same test in many ocassions. 2k children passed an intermediate number of tests. Children never received feed-back about their performance and each month, we passed, at least, one test for each child.RESULTSData relative to categorization of children's spelling samples are presented here. From these data, errors doubt to the dialect spoken in the zone where the study was carried out, were excluded, all of them are refered to consonantic substitutions. In this type of errors we included 'yeismo' (the palatal, africated, voiced consonat pronounced as the palatal, lateral, voiced one), 'seseo' (the interdental, africated, viceless consonat pronounced as the alveolar, africated, voiceless one) and 'ceceo' (the alveolar, africated, voiceless consonant pronounced as the interdental, africated, voiceless one) (L‡zaro, 1989).Later, we present the number of children who employ each type of category at each group. Spelling categories. Seven different categories were found. They reveal an increasing mastery of spelling and the usage of different types of knowledge (see examples in anexe I). a.. Lineal scribbles. A continuous trace imitating the external appearance of writing. b.. Random letters. Children use letters randomly without any kind of relation between the dictated word and the word spelled. c.. Partial Spelling: Here appears some relationship between sound and spelling but not all the phonemes in the word are mapped in the word spelled. Two subtypes may be distincted: vocalic partial spelling (only constituted by vowels) and consonantic-vocalic partial spelling (here appear vowels and some consonants). d.. General Substitutive Spelling: All the phonemes in the word are represented, but children substitute some graphemes by others with which they have no relation at all. e.. Specific Substitutive Spelling: All the phonemes in the word are represented but some graphemes are substituted by others. What characterizes this type of spelling is that interchanged graphemes represent very similar phonemes which only differ in one articulatory feature. f.. Non-orthographic Spelling: This category is characterized by a phonological (but not orthographic) acceptable spelling. In Spanish, some phonemes may be represented by two or more graphemes (/k/ may be spelled as 'c', 'k' or 'q') and children, with a partial orthographic knowledge, may still not know which grapheme must be spelled. g.. Conventional Spelling: Children were considered to reach conventional spelling when they spelled correctly the six words of the tests. Temporal distribution of spelling categories. Percentages of each category were obtained. Theese percentages were calculated monthly for each group (table 2).--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Insert table 2--------------------------------------------------------------------------------As table 2 shows, the most frequent spelling categories are: random letters and partial spelling in 1k children and partial spelling with some substitutions in 2k. 1p children use substitutions at the begining but they quickly use non-orthographic spelling until, finally they, spell in a conventional way.DISCUSIONOur results indicate how, actually, a string of different behaviours (characterized by some types of errors) are displayed at the initial stages of spelling development and may be interpreted as a reflect of differences in the knowledges that children have about spelling and its conventions. These knowledges keep on developing along the spelling learning proccess. Those behaviors are similar to the ones found by other authors in other languages (Read, 1971, 1975, 1986; Henderson & Beers, 1980; Lombardino, Bedford, Fortier, Carter, & Brandi, 1997; Treiman, Broderick, Tincoff & Rodr’guez, 1998), and, therefore, would indicate an universal trend, at spelling development, to make use of the same types of strategies and knowledges. So, using lineal scribbles may be interpreted as a first attempt, that children make, to produce something similar to spelling (Treiman, 1997). This type of spelling involves that children know that spelling presents a determinated appearance which tell them appart it from other expresion means as drawing.The fact that children use letters strings, even with no relation with the target word (random letters), points out that children already know that spelling is composed by letters and not by any other type of graphic symbols. This spelling category has been found by other authors in Spanish-speaking children (Bozorne & Signorini, 1998).With Partial Spelling, children make clear a great advance in their knowledge about language, as the establishment of the relation between spelling and spoken language is. Nevertheless, younger children spell principally vowels. Some authors (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982), have interpretated that children, actually, transcribe syllabes, representing their more salient part using vowels. This type of spelling is relatively frequent and has been found so in Spanish (Bozorne & Signorini, 1998) as in English (Rittle-Johnson & Siegler, 1999). Betwwen the two sbtypes of partial spelling, the consonantic-vocalic one could reflect an intermediate step from this stage to the next.Generals Substitutions would place children at the phonemic awareness level (see Defior, 1996 for a review). Nevertheless, due to their still limited alphabetic knowledge, children unknow some graphemes and spell using any of those that they have learnt, even if they have no relation at all with the sounds of the target word. Specific Substitutions would point out that children may carry on very sharp phonemic analysis, making a mistake only when distinctions must be made between phonemes which share all their articulatory features but one. This type of error has also been found in English children (Lombardino et al, 1997).To here, children spelling appeals predominantly to phonological route which improvement seems closely related to the parallel development of the phonological skills and the learning of the phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Now, the exclusive usage to this procedure, results in Non-orthographic spelling, which points out clearly that children have risen a high level of phonological knowledege since they can represent accurately the phonological pattern of the word. However, they have not reached the same mastery at the orthographic domain which depends not on the development of the phonological mediation system (even if it is its basis) as in the simultaneous elaboration of orthographic representations. The orthografic procedure will allow children to reach higher levels of spelling accuracy with the help of the instruction they recive and the learning proccess itself.Finally, Conventional spelling implies mastery (still uncompleted, yet the orthographic lexic keeps increasing) at the phonological domain and a high level at the orthographic one. Both procedures may be established, therefore, at a very early age (Serrano et al., 1999).Spelling developmentThe fact that there are differences between the categories used by the different groups of children as between the categories into the same group along the academic year, presumes the existence of qualitative changes in the spelling aquisition proccess. Here, we are not going to present the quantitative analysis of these changes, which indicates the children's progression in their explicit knowledge about the components of the sound structure of words and also about of the graphemes they are represented by and the orthographic lexic.In table 2, we may apreciate the predominant patterns of spelling in the three groups. Kindergaten groups more frequently use less developed patterns and show a clear unstable development. The incomplete analysis of word sound structure is a constant along the academic year. Specific substitutions, which indicate a fine-grainned analysis, begin to appear at the end of the year. Children are kept in low levels at the last two categories and this would indicate that spelling learning requires a systematic teaching, not only an incidental one as happened in these groups.If we analyze some results in 1p group, we may observe that there are neither lineal scribbles nor random letters since the sistematic teaching that they receive insists on the relation between spoken and writen language. The alphabetic principle (one sound, one letter) is already adquired in December, with a high percentage of children able to carry out a segmental analysis. However, phonemic analysis still causes difficulties, as the high level of specific substituions reveals. Children need to be confronted to reading and spelling during three more months to refine that analysis and make this type of spelling desappear. This fact emphasizes both this analysis dificulty and the influence of reading and spelling in its improvement. The percentage of non orthographic spelling decreases as the percentage of conventional spelling increases.In this way, children's spelling with a weak alphabetic knowledge (1k) shows spelling categories, in Ellis' (1994) terminology, 'precommunicative' and semiphonetic'. 2k children, as they familiarize with the alphabet, go through different substages in which we could consider a 'phonetic' stage, coming closer to phonemic recognition mastery. 1p children, since they receive a sistematic teaching of the alphabetic principle, they culminate code mastery and go through a 'transitional' stage in which they still make orthographic mistakes, to finally arrive to 'conventional' spelling.Thus, in Spanish, we found the precommunicative (lineals scribbels/random letters) stage; semiphonetic (partial spelling), phonetic (general and specific substituciones), transitional (non-orthographic spelling) and conventional (conventional) stages.Therefore, we think that spelling development in Spanish does not qualitatively differ from English. Differences would lay in the earlier ages of adquisition and the shorter time needed to learn the code; at age 5, children are able to spell bysillabic words accurately; at the end of the first year of primary education, children have reached a high control of the code.We want to point out how these results show that early spelling strongly leans on phonology, with a evolution of phonological knowldge from non-phonemic to phonemic one, as the different categories of spelling reveal, specially specific substitutions. The usage of lexical procedure is clear in the conventional spelling; orthographic knowledge developes more slowly, since it needs a longer learning proccess. Nevertheless, it is early employed, even in a limited way.Concluding, knowledges that children use to spell words are modified along learning proccess, getting from more general aspects to the knowledge of much more especific aspects. First, children learn that words have a determinated appearance, later, that they are composed by a particular type of signs and no by others. Then, they understand and point out their knowledge about the relationship between spelling and spoken lenguage. This knowledge is developed becoming aware of non segmetal elements until they are aware of phonemes. A trascendental step at spelling aquisition is to distinguish between the closer phonemes. In this proccess, systematic teaching of phoneme-grapheme correspondences is needed since, without it, no change appears as differences between kindergarten and 1p groups reveals.Finally, orthographic procedure is used from a very early age, but orthographic lexicon elaboration needs a long knowledge accumulation proccess. Yet it is true that, thanks to Spanish is a shallow orthography, children at early ages (5 and 6) are able to spell accurately many words; still remains a long way until the mastery of this skill, where other types of knowledges, as morphosintactic one, begin to show a growing relevance after the initial phase of learning. References.Bozorne, A.M., Signorini, A. (1998). Emergent writing forms in Spanish. Reading and Writing: Am Interdisciplinary Journal. 10, 499-517.Cuetos, F. y Valle-Arroyo F. (1988). Modelos de lectura y dislexia, Infancia y Aprendizaje 44 3-19.Defior, S., (1996). Una clasificaci—n de las tareas utilizadas en la evaluaci—n de las habilidades fonol—gicas y algunas ideas para su mejora. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 73, 49-63.Ehri, L. C. (1986). Sources of difficulty in learning to spell and read. Advances in Devolpmental and Behavioural Paediatrics, 7, 121-195.Ellis, N. C. (1994). Longitudinal Studies of Spelling Development. In Gordon D. A. Brown and Nick C. Ellis (Eds.) Handbook of Spelling, (155-178). Chichester. John Wiley y Sons Ltd.Ferreiro, E. y Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. New York: Heinemann.Frith, U. (1985). Beneath the surface of developmental dislexia. En K. Patterson, M. Colheart y J. Marshall (eds.) Surface Dislexia. London. LEA.Gentry, J. R. (1978). Early spelling strategies. The Elementary School Journal, 79, 88-92.Gentry, J. R. (1982). Analysis of Developmental spelling in GNYS AT WORK. The Reading Teacher, 36, 192-200.Gombert, J. E. (1996). What do children do when they fail to count phonemes? International Journal of Behavioral Development 19(4): 757-772 Henderson, E.H. and Beers, J.W. (Eds.) (1980). Developmental and cognitive Aspects of Learning to Spell: A Reflection of Word Knowledge. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.L‡zaro, F. (1989). Lengua Espa–ola Madrid. AnayaLombardino, L.J., Bedford, T., Fortier, C., Carter J. y Brandi J. (1997). Invented Spellign: Developmental Patterns in Kindergarten Children and Guidelines for Early Literacy Intervention.Read, C. (1971). Pre-school children's knowledge of English phonology. Hardvard Educational Review, 41 1-34.Read, C. (1975). Children's categorisations of speech sounds in English. Urbana III.: National Council of Teachers of English.Read, C., (1986). Children's Creative Spelling. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul.Rittle-Johnson, B. y Siegler, R. S. (1999). Learning to Spell: Variability, Choice and Change in Children's Strategy Use. Child Development, 70 (2) 332-348.Serrano, J., Alegr’a, J. y Carrillo, M (1999). El proceso del aprendizaje de la escritura en castellano y en francŽs, un estudio comparativo. Comunicaci—n al IV Simposio de PsicolingŸ’stica. Miraflores de la Sierra, Madrid. 21-24 de abril.Treiman, R. (1997). Spelling in normal children and dyslexics. En Blachman (Ed.) Foundations of Reading Acquisition and Dyslexia: Implications for Early Intervention. (191-218). Mahwah, New Jersey, Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.Treiman, R., Broderick, V., Tincoff, R. y Rodr’guez K. (1998). Children's Phonological Awareness: Confusions between Phonemes that Differ Only in Voicing. Journal of Experimental child Psychology 68 3-21.Torgesen J. K. y Davis, C. (1996). Idividual Difference Variables That Predict Response to Training in Phonological Awareness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 63 1-21.Valle-Arroyo, F. (1989). Errores en lectura y escritura, un modelo lineal. Cognitiva 2 (1) 32-63.
poster
This study investigates the relationship between children's understandingof the advantage in their action strategies and their understanding of thesemantic difference between the modal verbs dovere (must) and potere (may)in their function of behaviour regulation (deontic modality).This research is based on a previous study by the authors. In that study,48 children divided in two age groups: 3;0-4;6, 4;7-5;10 were presentedwith a task in which they had to act according to obligations, permissionsand prohibitions expressed by sentences containing a deontic modal verb.The sentences requested actions associated with advantageous (win) anddisadvantageous (loss) outcome. The children were told that they had toobey to the modals and try to gain as much as possible. They were told thatthey might decide not to act under the circumstances permitted by the modalverb.We found that1) in both age groups the children did not differentiate between dovere(must) and potere (may); they performed the disadvantageous actionsregardless of whether the request was modalised with devi (must) or puoi(may);2) the prohibitions were already understood at the age of 3/4. At the ageof 5 children started to anticipate the advantage in their actionstrategies and to distinguish between advantageous and disadvantageousoutcome; few of them were able not to act when abstention was to theiradvantage.The distinction between dovere and potere relies on the understandingthat there are circumstances where it is possible not to act andcircumstances where action is mandatory. Accordingly, the second studytests the hypothesis that the ability to understand advantage in actionstrategies facilitates the distinction between dovere and potere .100 children, divided in two age groups (4;1-4;11 and 5;1-6;0) were testedfor both the understanding of advantage in their action strategies, and theunderstanding of the distinction between devi (must) and puoi (may).The understanding of advantage was assessed by means of a task in which thechildren had to comply with the experimenter's prohibition and perform themost advantageous action between the three possible.The understanding of the distinction between dovere (must) and potere (may)was assessed by means of the deontic task previously used by the authors.Results show that only from 5 years on, the understanding of advantage inaction strategies affects the distinction between dovere and potere:. Atthe age of 5/6 children who understand the advantage, understand as wellthe semantic distinction between the two verbs.On the basis of these results we conclude that the relationship betweenlanguage and thought has a dynamic nature in this domain. The children whoare able to anticipate the advantageous outcome of their actions alsounderstand more accurately the constraints imposed on the listener's actionby the different modal expressions used by the speaker.
poster
Up to now, the role of the modality of informative access in the productionof accurate referential messages has been ignored by the studies ofreferential communication. Objects or pictures have always been presentedvisually. However, given the young age of the subjects, a Piagetianperspective would suggest a positive impact of active stimuli manipulationin addition to their visual inspection.Recent research on haptic exploration shows that the haptic modalityprovides information about objects that is different from the informationvisually derived. The haptic system involves a different kind ofrepresentation. Structural properties (such as shape and size) are moresalient when we see an object, while material properties (such as textureand consistence) are more salient when we explore it by the haptic modality(Klatzky & Lederman 1993). Research on haptic classification by children(Berger & Hatwell, 1995) shows that different dimensions (texture,consistence, shape) are processed differently, and that there is a changewith age. Finally, research on object exploration and recognition by blindand sighted children shows no difference between the two groups, eventhough blind children had no previous visual experience with objects(Morrongiello et al. 1994).In our experiment the influence of the modality of informative access onthe production of accurate referential messages has been investigated byusing a referential communication task derived from the classical 'stackthe blocks' (Glucksberg, Krauss & Weisberg 1966). We studied 30 preschoolchildren, between the ages of 5 and 6 years. Children were presented withsets of stimuli which varied by number of relevant features (two or three)and by modality of presentation (tactual only, visual only, visual andtactual).The main effects of modality and number of relevant features aresignificant, as well as their interaction. Tactual modality is moredifficult than the other two. Set III (three relevant features) is moredifficult than set I and set II (two relevant features). Lastly, theinteraction shows that in the sets I and II the performance for visual andtactual-visual sets is better than for the tactual one, while in set IIIthe performance is low in all three modalities of access.As far as number of relevant features is concerned our results agree withthe current literature. As far as the effect of modality is concerned, weinterpret our data as showing that different processes are involved invisual vs. tactual referential tasks. If the two systems were dependent onone another, then haptic exploration of an object would have enriched thecognitive representation built on vision. As a consequence we should havefound a better performance on visual-tactual tasks than on only visualtasks. Instead we had similar results in these two modalities of access.Therefore, we can conclude that haptic and visual systems are independentand, in visual-tactual tasks, only the visual system, dominant in sightedchildren, is operating.
poster
Reading with young children is a powerful way to enhance languagedevelopment and to build an early love of books and reading. This studyexamined the frequency and style of reading patterns of 24 teachers ofinfants (29 males and 26 females) in four different middle-class childcarecenters in a mid-sized urban area in the USA. Of the 55 infants observed,35 were read to although infants were awake and available for readingabout 75% of the observation times. A modified event/time samplingprocedure was used to record reading by adults during 15 second segments.No absent or sleeping infants were included in the analyses of data. Forinfants 4-8 months old, only 1 of 13 was read to; for infants 9 to 12months, 7 of 13 were read to; for infants 13 to 17 months, 13 of 15 wereread to. All 14 infants 18 to 27 months were read to at some time. Thus,teachers tended to read much less with infants under one year of age thanwith toddlers. Teachers read most frequently to a single child: 74.1%of the 15 second reading segments recorded. Per 15 second readingsegment, teachers read to two babies 10.4% of the time; 3 babies 8.1%; 4babies 5.7% ; 5 babies 1.% and 9 babies .8%. Of the 174 reading episodescoded in 15 second segments, the number of infants in a reading episoderarely changed: only during 11 ( 6.3% of episodes). The mean readingepisode lasted for a mean of 4.5 (SD 4.3) 15' segments, or about 1minute; 1.4 of episodes lasted 1 1/4 to 2 mnutes; 64.1% of episodes lastedonly from 15' to 1 minute. Reading to babies was a very brief activity. In137 out of 174 reading episodes (77%), infants were read to singly. Forthese infants, the length of reading episode did not differ significantlyby child age. For infants 4 to 12 months, 66.3 % of 28 reading episodeslasted about 1 minute; one episode lasted more than 2 minutes. Fortoddlers 13 to 27 months, of 109 episodes 61% lasted 1 to 4 segments;21.9% lasted 5 to 8 segments (1 to 2 minutes). Only 17.1% lasted more than2 minutes. Thus teachers did not increase the length of reading episodesfor older infants. Adults did read more text and used more pointing andeye contact with toddlers than with younger babies. They tended to 'labeland describe' more with younger infants. Verbal elaboration was rarelyused during reading episodes. Some techniques were used more with maleinfants (verbal controls to gain infant boys' attention ) and some wereused more with females (pointing and eye contact). Reading with youngbabies was rare in this childcare sample. Choosing books carefully andmoving judiciously in response to child interest and age from picture booksharing to reading text is a skill for teachers to learn. Babies can bekept enchanted and absorbed by simple stories; but training and specificskill building may be needed to help caregivers learn how to lure babiesto give lengthy attention to engaging picture books. Teachers need tolearn to use modulation of voice tones, insert more labels, descriptions,and explanations into story book text, ask babies to point to animals orfamiliar objects, express pleasure and delight at the pictures, snuggleinfants, support joint attention to pictures, and make daily specialopportunities and comfortable spaces for reading. Teacher trainingprograms may want to focus more on helping caregivers become more skilledat choosing cadenced rhymes and rhythms as well as personally interestingtext and pictures for infants and for toddlers.
poster
Language development is a multisensory activity relying on the dynamicinterplay of the child’s brainand environment. The present paper concentrates on the effects ofcongenital visual or auditorydeficits on the child’s language acquisition process. Three up to nowrather unrelated disciplines playan important role in our approach, i.e. cognitive neuroscience, dynamicsystems theory andpsycholinguistics.Studies in the field of language acquisition in exceptionalcircumstances revealed an impressive arrayof different ways in which the effects of experience can influence itsdynamics. Taking a closer lookat the common grounds of various instances of language developmentallows for the spotting ofsystem-specific developmental growth curves each of them depending onthe interplay of the givenneural infrastructure and the provided input.The moulding of language demands both the sifting of incominginformation and further organisation ofthe selected material on various levels. This requires the extraction ofpatterns/rules which are appliedto distributionally and hierarchically defined morphosyntacticcategories. Congenitally blind andvisually impaired children have to sort out patterns and map externalsituations onto inner states.The plasticity of the neural aggregate involved in the organisation ofthe individual systems sets clearlymarked time limits ( critical phases) for the intake and processing ofinformation, i.e. the neuralsubstrate for multimodal activities develops and matures at differentrates. Consequently, each systemdisplays a specific evolutionary chart.The data of visually/auditorily impaired/blind subjects presented herecover the age range of 2;2 to6;3 years (onset of investigation) and were compared to a sightedcontrol group. Completetransliterations of the children’s and parents’/investigator’s speechand interaction coded accordingthe guidelines of CHILDES (MacWhinney 1991) form the basis for theconstruction of semanticmaps linking our approach with Kohonen’s (1995) mathematical model ofself-organising maps(SOMs). Semantic clusters and the resultant definition of prototypes arerepresented and visualisedby SOMs which are based on Kohonen’s (ibid.) learning algorithm.The results achieved so far suggest that the degree of visual/auditoryloss is only a vague indicator ofcognitive and linguistic capacities (with its most significant influenceapparently on the early phases).However, it can be seen clearly that the honeycomb pattern reflectingthe children’s one-word-stageopens up into stripes with the onset of mophosyntactic structures.By visualising the specific time-coded differences in developments oflexical and morphosyntacticstructures comparisons across and within the respective groups arefacilitated. Therefore, thisdynamic approach may shed light on the evolution of functional neuralsystems in normal development as well as on the extent of neuralplasticity in deficient starting conditions.
poster
A series of studies explore how early stimulus equivalence relations are formed in verbal and nonverbal humans. According to Sidman (1971), the properties of equivalence relations must include: reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity. The present study attempts to eliminate methodological confounds found in the Devany, Hayes and Nelson (1986) and the Augustson and Dougher (1992) studies and relates the phenomenon of equivalence to language competence. 10 normal subjects, 8 males and 2 females age 21 to 25 months participated in experimental sessions of approximately 30 minutes each for 5 to 15 consecutive weekly days . Receptive and expressive language skills were assessed through the administration of The Bzoch-League Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language Scale (1991) for the Measurement of Language Skills in Infancy (REEL Scale 2). Procedure. The experimental tasks consisted of matching different animal-like figures using a matching-to-sample (visual-visual) conditional discrimination format. Each animal figure was colored with one of six water color paints (red, brown, green, purple, yellow, and orange) and color assignment was random. Using a single subject design, infants were taught four conditional discriminations: if A, then B; if A, then C; if D, then E; and if D, then F. The order of presentation and the left-right position of correct response were counterbalanced across training and testing trials. Once the infants learned these mixed relations, the transitivity equivalence test was presented. Equivalence was established when a child matched B and C, in as much as A had been the matching sample for both, and when a child matched E and F, both of which earlier had been paired to D. Results. All 10 subjects attained criterion on the four independent conditional discriminations and on the mixed training. 5 subjects who attained transitivity (at 80% or above), failed at least one of the four symmetry tests, that is, performed below chance level. 8 out of our 10 subjects performed between 80 and 100 % correct responses in the transitivity tests. Subjects in our study required between 34 to 242 trials (mean103) to learn the two (A-B, A-C) relations, and the four mixed relations (A-B, A-C, D-E, D-F). In contrast, the Devany et al. subjects required from 50 to 70 trials, with a mean of 68, to reach their response criterion. This difference in number of training trials to criterion may have to do with the fact that our infant subjects had to attain a more strict response criterion (9 consecutive correct), and were less developmentally advanced, than the children of Devany et al. study (our subjects ranged from 21 to 25 months and theirs from 25 to 52 months). We found a significant negative correlation of -.84 (at better than p < .01 alpha level) when we related the total number of trials to meet criterion during the conditional discrimination training to the combined receptive and expressive language quotient. That is, those children with higher language-skills scores required fewer trials to complete the conditional discrimination training. We conclude that language skills are related to the demonstration of stimulus equivalence.
poster
A generally accepted assumption made by those who study languageand reference is that linguistic reference involves two main components:one's beliefs about language itself and one's beliefs about those who uselanguage to refer (e.g., Baldwin & Moses, 1992; Cummins, 1989; Dennett,1987; Searle, 1970). Although many researchers have examined theimportance of referential cues brought by human agents to labeling tasks,the predominant use of novel labels in such studies leave questionsunanswered concerning familiar language use. An understanding of referenceis revealed not only when words are attached to referents for the veryfirst time, but also in children's expectations regarding the consistencyof associations between words and referents. In the proposed research, we have examined 16-month-olds' abilityto discriminate between 'true' and 'false' statements about the world,specifically accurate versus inaccurate pairings of words and objects.Work on early lexical development suggests that infants do expect familiarlabels to match the objects with which they have been associated (Golinkoffet al., 1987, Nelson, 1973, Benedict, 1979). However, infants frequentlyare confronted with situations in which words fail to match up with theirperceptual experience (Baldwin, 1991). In these contexts, referentialspeaker cues may be important in assisting infants to map labels to theircorrect referents (Baldwin, 1993; Oviatt, 1985). The aim of our researchwas to examine infants' understanding of the stability of associationsbetween words and referents in both an unsupportive labeling context (i.e.,labels provided by a disembodied voice) and a supportive one (i.e., with ahuman speaker providing labels). In a familiarization paradigm, we presented infants either withsequences of 'true' utterances (e.g., 'that's a ball' paired with a slideof a ball) or 'false' utterances (e.g., 'that's a ball' paired with apicture of a dog). We conducted one variant in which infants heard labelspresented over a concealed audio speaker and one in which a live humanspeaker provided the labels. We hypothesized that infants should (1) findit difficult to familiarize to repeated instances of violations ofword/object matches; (2) find it difficult to discriminate between true andfalse sentences after being familiarized to repeated violations; and (3)have greatest difficulty with false utterances when a human provides thelabel, as such contexts would violate their expectations about thecommunicative intentions of human speakers. Consistent with our first two predictions, infants treated true andfalse utterances differently during both familiarization and test trials:Infants in the false condition were significantly less interested in thelabeled objects during familiarization and spent significantly more timelooking at the human who was present in the room; they also failed todistinguish true from false utterances at test. This general pattern ofresults did not differ as a function of whether a human speaker was visiblyresponsible for the labeling. These results suggest that 16-month oldinfants do expect words to map consistently to a referent but that thisexpectation does not necessarily derive from expectations concerning thecommunicative intentions of other humans.
poster
Understanding how children learn the meaning of words has many times been conceptualized as a process of making inferences about a word's meaning (Woodward & Markman, 1998). By assuming that word learning is a process of induction, knowledge about the meanings of words may increase from a state of no knowledge, to a sense of familiarity, and finally to understanding a word's meaning. Shore and Kempe (1999), Durso and Shore (1991), and Shore and Durso (1990) have found this gradual increase in comprehension with adults. In these studies, adults were able to identify which sentence used a target word correctly even for words they could not define or use in a sentence. Although adults made accurate inferences about words for which they had only partial knowledge, it is uncertain whether a similar process occurs early in development. A modified looking-to-target procedure was used to determine if 45 15-month-old babies and 40 22-months-old babies differed in looking to labeled objects. Parents were contacted 3-5 days before a test session, given a list of object labels, and asked to assess their child's knowledge about each label. Word knowledge was collected across three levels of knowledge (known, frontier, and unknown). Known words were words a child understood, frontier words were words a child had heard but did not understand, and unknown words were words never heard by a child. Two pictures from each word level were paired together for baseline and test trials, and objects were labeled before test by saying 'Where is the ____'. The mean looking to the labeled object was calculated for each word level.An age (15-months, 22 months) x gender (male, female) x time (baseline, test) x word level (known, frontier, unknown, and nonsense) ANOVA revealed an age x time x word level interaction, F [3,243] 3D 3, p < .05. Although both 15- and 22-month-olds increased looking to the labeled object as knowledge about the labels increased, 22-month-olds demonstrated greater differences in accumulated looking across word levels. The 15-month-olds looked significantly longer to objects at their known levels, compared to their unknown levels, t[44] 3D 2.16, p < .05. In contrast, 22-month-olds not only looked longer to objects at known levels compared to frontier levels (t[39] 3D 3.13, p < .01), and unknown levels (t[39] 3D 5.28, p < .01), but looking to objects at frontier levels was also significantly different from unknown levels (t[39] 3D 2.30, p < .05). There were no differences between looking to objects labeled with unknown words or nonsense words as well as no differences between looking to different objects during baseline. Empirically testing intermediate levels of word knowledge has important advantages over dichotomizing this knowledge as either known or unknown. It not only affords increased understanding of the acquisition of word meanings both early in development and later in life, but it also allows for investigation of the inferences made about partially known words by children as young as 22-months of age.
poster
In the early stages of language acquisition, typically-developingchildren use both speech and gesture in their efforts to communicate.Recent research has indicated that gesture may be a predictor of futureverbal accomplishments, such as the appearance of the first word (e.g.,Bates, 1976) or the onset of two-word speech (e.g., Goldin-Meadow & Butcher,1999). While a number of investigators have described the development ofgesture and its relationship to emerging language abilities, little is knownabout the nature of gesture's role in the language-learning process. Thepresent study begins to address this issue by exploring the role of gesturein early lexical acquisition in a longitudinal examination of children's useof words and gestures to refer to objects. Five typically-developing children (3 girls and 2 boys) were videotaped intheir homes while engaged in free play with toys with either a parent or anexperimenter. Sessions took place biweekly, beginning when children wereone-word speakers (between the ages of 12 and 15.5 months), and ending whenthey began to produce two-word combinations (between the ages of 18 and 22.5months). All of the children's communicative gestures and meaningful words(i.e., words used reliably to refer to a specific referent) were transcribedfrom the videotapes. In addition, all instances in which children referredto an object were identified and coded according to whether the referencewas made in speech-only (e.g., saying 'ball'), gesture-only (e.g., pointingto the ball), or gesture + speech (pointing to the ball and saying 'ball).Data analyses focused on the frequency of object references, thedistributions of items in the speech-only, gesture-only, and speech +gesture categories over time, and the developmental history of itemsappearing in multiple sessions (i.e., the modality in which they firstappeared and whether and how they shifted over time). Results indicated that for all children, a majority of objectreferences occurred in gesture, either alone or with speech, and there wasvery little overlap between a child's gestural referents and that child'sspoken referents. However, relative use of speech and gesture to refer toobjects changed substantially over development. Initially, all fivechildren referred to more objects in gesture-only than in speech-only, apattern that held until children were approximately 18 months of age, whenthe number of items in speech-only equaled or surpassed the number of itemsin gesture-only for each child. Finally, there was a strong tendency foritems produced in multiple sessions either to remain in gesture-onlythroughout the period of observation, or to appear initially in gesture andthen in speech in a subsequent session; it was relatively uncommon for itemsto appear initially in speech. Taken together, the results of these analyses suggest that gesture plays acrucial role in lexical development, providing a way for children to referto objects that they cannot yet label in speech. Findings are discussed interms of the notion of gesture as a 'transitional device' in languagelearning and symbolic development, the role of gesture in early parent-childinteractions, and the developing relationship between gesture and speech.
poster
At the end of infancy, measures of vocabulary and utterance length(maternal report from the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory),receptive and expressive language (experimenter-assessed from the ReynellScales), and child imitative behavior with objects were obtained in a groupof North American, middle-class, Caucasian families living in a largemetropolitan area (N27). Maternal verbal intelligence was also assessedusing the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. At 48 months of age, childrenwere given several tasks examining theory of mind understanding, includinga false belief task, a task that assessed understanding of the relativecertainty of the mental verbs think, know, could, and must in relation toexternal reality, and a task that assessed understanding that pretendinginvolves a mental representation as opposed to involving only action. Datawere also collected on verbal and non-verbal intelligence at 48 monthsusing the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of IntelligenceScales-Revised. All three theory of mind tasks were predicted by earliersymbolic behaviors and predicted child verbal IQ but were unrelated tochild nonverbal IQ and maternal verbal IQ. In addition, individualdifferences in language development when children were 24 and 36 months ofage predicted individual performance on the false belief task independentof 48 month verbal IQ. These data are discussed with respect to theimportance of language to acquisition of complex concepts related to 'mind'and specifically to understanding representational stances that do notmatch reality.
poster
In an investigation of infants' expressions of affect and maternal responsiveness to infant affect in relation to early language achievement, 77 dyads were visited in their homes and videotaped in free play at 9 and 13 months, and mothers were interviewed about their children's word learning and advances in symbolic language between 9 and 21 months. Children's first- and second-year achievements in language evolve from multiple developing systems in children and within their social contexts. As one part of this interplay of influences, infants' experiences sharing subjective states with parents may serve as an important foundation for language acquisition. In this longitudinal study, we investigated mothers' matching of their infants' affect (termed 'affect attunement' by Stern, 1985), in relation to language acquisition, because affect attunement is thought to play a role in infants' emergent intersubjective capacity. The Early Language Inventory (ELI; Bates, et al., 1988) and the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Fenson et al., 1994), as well as checklists exemplifying various semantic usages of words and phrases (Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1994), were used to assess the timing of children's first words in comprehension and first words in production in the first year. In the second year, the timing of children's production of 50 words was assessed, as well as the onset of combinatorial speech and the age at which children use language to express a memory. Mothers' affect matching responses were defined as responses that were congruent with either categorical or gradient features in the infants' affect expression. Nonmatching responses were defined as emotionally neutral responses attuned to neither gradient nor categorical information in the affective expression. Maternal responses that matched infant affect were more predictive of children's language achievement than nonmatching responses. In addition, maternal matching responses at 9 months were more predictive of children's language achievements than matching responses at 13 months. Infants' expressions of affect per se did not predict later language achievements. The results suggest that, by fostering a general interest in and understanding of communication, mothers' attuned affective exchanges in the first year motivate infants to put emergent symbolic capacities in the service of linguistic communication in their second year of life. Moreover, it may be that the first year in particular is a crucial period for the effectiveness of mother-infant shared affect with regard to language acquisition, such that affective exchanges in mother-infant interaction are most salient in advance of the cognitive-representational abilities reflected in such behaviors as verbal labeling, advanced exploration, and pretend play.
poster
One hundred percent of the words children speak are learned. Thus, whilechildren growing up in different language communities are all on the road tovocabulary production, at any give time in any given place children varyenormously amongst themselves in their vocabulary development. How do childrenbeing reared in different linguistic communities differ in their vocabulary? Asa first step toward addressing this comparative and cross-cultural developmentalpsycholinguistic question, we collected data about child vocabulary from mothersin six different language communities. We used a standardized instrument,modified to be culturally sensitive, and we studied only typically developingchildren of only one age. Mothers of 228 20-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium,France, Israel, Italy, and the United States completed the Early LanguageInventory (the ELI consists of 624 words divided into 19 categories); aquestionnaire to assess mothers' tendency to make socially desirable responses(maternal reports of children's behavior may overestimate children's abilities,and research has pointed to cultural differences in self-serving bias); andfamily sociodemographic questionnaire. To ensure equivalence across countries,all instruments were translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew, andItalian, and then back-translated by bilingual natives (in addition, the authorsand their colleagues who were professionals in psychology and native to thecountries added or substituted words as culturally appropriate). The followingdependent measures were analyzed: proportion of total words (the sum of thewords children knew across all ELI categories divided by the maximum number ofwords possible in that particular country) and proportions of possible nouns,verbs, adjectives, and closed-class words. All relevant sociodemographicvariables were investigated as potential covariates. Cultural differencesemerged in total words and in more specific contents of children's vocabularywhen analyzed separately: Mothers reported that children speaking all sixlanguages said significantly more nouns than verbs than adjectives thanclosed-class words. Gender differences in the size of children's vocabularieswere also consistent: Girls said significantly more words overall and by wordcategory than boys. Finally, analyses among categories of words across culturesand by culture showed that each category was highly correlated with every othercategory, suggesting that children who know the most nouns are also the ones whoknow the most verbs, adjectives, and closed-class words. The following featuresdistinguish the present study: homogeneous but comparable samples of mothers andchildren in six Western first-world countries participated; comprehensive dataon a number of social and economic characteristics which may relate to childlanguage acquisition were monitored and controlled; the same methodology wasused in all locales; both genders were represented; and child age was heldrelatively constant across groups.